Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
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Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
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Re: Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
#2An interesting read, I would agree with the author, Apple is making it difficult, not impossible for govt to get your data.
TLDR, apple's claim is misleading, govt can get data in other ways
Re: Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
#3I'm sorry, but this is just plain wrong.
Let's take "since the key is physically burned in"... You don't need to burn it in, it could easily be stored in a few bytes of on-die sram. As for the assertion that a de-powered chip can't wipe itself? You can just go out and buy a self wiping chip ... you don't need to be either Apple or the NSA, just have a credit card.
Re: Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
#4I'd like for people to start thinking about security measures, including encryption, as a cost function rather than as a boolean condition (e.g. safe vs. unsafe; stop the NSA vs. not stop the NSA). I doubt there is anyone who can stop the NSA from executing a targeted attack that breaches that information.
My feeling is that good security measures increase the marginal cost per person surveilled. As the article points out, there are some kinds of communications that Apple is obliged to provide access to. Those are likely to carry low marginal costs per person surveilled, as law enforcement may have the legal means to directly and unilaterally access that information. Even if they don't, the capacity for Apple, telecoms, whoever, to operate in "God mode" with respect to some kinds of communications means that mechanism is a good target for agencies like the NSA to breach.
By contrast, even flawed technologies like iMessage (centralized key management) raise the per-person marginal cost by forcing attacks to be reasonably targeted. While the NSA could probably figure out how to attack Apple's key management infrastructure to set themselves up with a virtual iMessage device for an individual, doing so for all the people would, in principle, be fairly noticeable to Apple.
The more we can instrument technologies that force attacks from "bulk mode" to "targeted," the better chance we have at actually curbing surveillance. Of course, this still leaves the panopticon problem--if we accept that targeted attacks will always be possible, and that any of us could be watched at roughly any time, the psychological chilling effects of surveillance remain.
Re: Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
#5I'd like for people to start thinking about security measures, including encryption, as a cost function rather than as a boolean condition (e.g. safe vs. unsafe; stop the NSA vs. not stop the NSA). I doubt there is anyone who can stop the NSA from executing a targeted attack that breaches that information. My feeling is that good security measures increase the marginal cost per person surveilled. As the article point…
Rising the cost hurts the population much more in the long run - we, the people, we pay the surveillance for us. No one else.
We must fight hard that we don't need to pay that tax any more - money which flows in large sums directly to the military/industrial complex.
Re: Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
#6An interesting read, I would agree with the author, Apple is making it difficult, not impossible for govt to get your data. TLDR, apple's claim is misleading, govt can get data in other ways
How is Apple's claim misleading? The cryptography is sound, and that is the only thing Apple is "claiming". In this article, titled somewhat sensationally to clickbait, points out valid claims, but they have little to do with Apple's cryptographic solution.
Re: Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
#7I'd like for people to start thinking about security measures, including encryption, as a cost function rather than as a boolean condition (e.g. safe vs. unsafe; stop the NSA vs. not stop the NSA). I doubt there is anyone who can stop the NSA from executing a targeted attack that breaches that information. My feeling is that good security measures increase the marginal cost per person surveilled. As the article point…
Rising the cost hurts the population much more in the long run - we, the people, we pay the surveillance for us. No one else. We must fight hard that we don't need to pay that tax any more - money which flows in large sums directly to the military/industrial complex.
I think you misunderstood the term "cost" as used here.
Re: Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rising the cost hurts the population much more in the long run - we, the people, we pay the surveillance for us. No one else. We must fight hard that we don't need to pay that tax any more - money which flows in large sums directly to the military/industrial complex.
I think you misunderstood the term "cost" as used here.
Not sure, no. Why?
Re: Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
#9MitM with a 0-day payload? Acid etching and SEM? You would have to be an extremely high-value target to legitimately worry about this stuff.
The post is attacking a straw man. Apple's iPhone security is meant to address criminals, mass surveillance, and overzealous law enforcement. They're not claiming a single phone will withstand the entire resources of the NSA devoted to breaking it.
Re: Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
#10Although I agree with the premise -- a sufficiently dedicated attacker can defeat many mechanisms you can come up with to protect your data -- many of the points that the author makes seem to be based on either incorrect or implausible assumptions.
For instance, the claim that modern cell protocols can be "silently" MITMed is not really true; the current known attack to spoof a GSM tower, I believe, is limited to using some vulnerabilities in older GSM protocols, and may not work against modern 3G or LTE. And, indeed, the paper cited on a cryptosystem in GSM 3G being weak enough to pull data off the air does not say that at all: it simply weakens the cipher, but the conclusion of that paper itself says that the attack may not be viable for current networks.
The author's view of how the UID works in the Secure Enclave is weak at best, as well. The article that the author cites the possibility of the "Secure Enclave code being able to read the UID key"; as comex mentioned yesterday [1], this isn't true. (I know also that other SoCs work the same way that comex mentions; this is a common pattern.) The author then goes on to discuss what could be done even if the key bits were extracted from fuses (an attack that I agree is possible); he claims a cycle time of 800 per iteration if executed on a CPU, but in reality, the encryption is done on a dedicated AES engine; I believe a cycle time closer to 4 per iteration is more likely, giving timescale estimates over 2 orders of magnitude worse than the author suspects.
It's not all bad, though. The author makes at least one very good point: 0day on the device, while it is powered on, could be enough to simply run the entire device through the onboard crypto. The exploit doesn't need to be complicated enough to modify the system software permanently -- as long as it can be used once, that's good enough.
I think the crux of the matter is that this crypto scheme is not designed to stop the NSA, anyway: it's designed to stop comex and to stop the local police. If you need an NSA-proof device, you need a much much smaller attack surface to begin with.